A while back, I dropped any support for RSS 1.0 on this weblog.
Author: Bryant
I’m running out of elliptical titles for posts about awards. Ah well.
Um, yeah, the Origins Awards. I didn’t game much this last year. That won’t stop me from commenting, though!
I see, among the Best RPG nominees: five licensed games. Well, four; I don’t think it counts as a license when the same person is writing both the original text (Artesia) and the RPG. Four out of the five use existing systems, with varying degrees of adaptation to the world.
No Dogs in the Vineyard.
There’s a lot of creativity in every RPG, licensed or not, original mechanics or not. I can’t believe that a bunch of licenses based on existing mechanics represents the most creative stuff the industry has to offer, though.
And after a bit of quick perl hackery, we have the results from my Oscar contest! Kyle entered twice; I took his later entry as the final one. This seems reasonable, particularly since his first entry took second place, tied with kodi and yukon_jack. Kyle, drop me an email and we’ll talk about your banner.
As a whole, our collective predictive intelligence was not as good as Kyle’s final set of picks, and wasn’t much better than the second place finishers (depending on how you count ties). C’est la vie.
Full results after the break.
I just realized that what I really want out of the Internet is a Television Without Pity for comic books. Chris led me to this revelation. Can someone do something about that?
Let’s turn it around. Let’s say a 78 year old lawyer shot Dick Cheney in the face while hunting.
Think it would have taken an entire day before the news was released?
Think the lawyer would have had at least made a statement within a couple days of the incident?
Think the lawyer would be able to skip being interviewed by the police until the morning after the incident?
It’s kind of an unfair comparison; you have to be a little more careful when someone shoots an elected official. Still and all, it’s not as if Vice Presidents shoot people that often. You can probably treat such incidents as serious — rather than “sure, we’ll come back tomorrow and talk about it” — without placing an undue burden on the institution of the Vice President.
I currently have 13 entries for the Oscar picks, as follows: Kirby, Chris T., dancingshaman, telepresence, michele_blue, doogs19, Chad U., kodi, Wyatt, Cass, Brant, Kit, and twillitts. I’m dead serious about the sponsorship thing. I’m gonna throw up a banner for the winner.
There is very little love for one movie as Best Picture, but I won’t tell you which one. Poor thing. I’ll post a summary of entries after the event itself, though.
I got nothing to say about the Oscars this year except for extended bitterness regarding David Cronenberg. That’s OK! kniedzw found an Oscar pool widget, and I thought that was cool, so I set up one of my own.
Go here, make your predictions, and wait. The winner will get to be the sponsor of this blog for a week. I hear that’s a big thing.
Sadly, until this Audacity bug is fixed, I’m gonna have trouble getting the Doc Savage podcast underway. At least it’s a known issue.
So, steampunk. It’s a loose, poorly fitting excuse for a genre. The Wikipedia entry reveals that pretty definitely. You got your computer parables, you got your obsession with steam, you got your fantasy tropes. You do not got decades of cheap adventure novels defining the genre. We make do with what we have, thusly.
Let us assume that the class warfare aspect of steampunk does not appeal to our prospective player as a primary focus of the campaign. I’m keeping the steam-powered automata-driven London, cause come on, how cool is that? The task at hand becomes finding a premise that makes good use of the setting. Doing Scotland Yard operatives is easy but then the setting is just background, rather than integral.
I have never been adverse to layering a touch of the horrific into my settings.
Let’s say that the gears of the difference engines, when layered as closely together as they must be in order to achieve the necessary efficiencies, attract visitors. Angelic and demonic alike? That’s sort of cool. Actually, that’s really cool, since nothing says angels are going to approve of the Queen.
I’m almost lifting from Dark Inheritance here, but it’s a cool setting. I can pull the Brotherhood of the Iron Rose, the Eight Heavenly Dragons, the International Geographic Society, and the Promethean Order wholesale, so I will. Drop the godgenes, drop the titans.
I believe that this consequence is not widely known. In fact, the Engines are only just now getting big enough. Characters should be people who have some sort of relation to the Engines — whether people who live nearby, mechanists, members of the House of Engineers? (Our third legislative body, occupying an uncomfortable slot between the House of Lords and the House of Commons.)
Huh. Sure. Angels/demons manifest as mechanicals, a la the Turk. But with … well, I’ll save that.
Doodle, doodle.